the birdcage cover

She sat there silently with the cover over the birdcage. She should have gotten rid of it weeks ago when it died, and the family nagged her to do so. But she wouldn’t and to try and explain it to them was to try and make them see that the colour of the world was just a lie your eyes told. Nothing is really there. There are just spiked signals for the eyes, the ears, the tongue, the nose, a touch, the heart. None of it is real. Just the noise of the waking world hissing to distraction...

He had taught the bird to sing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine..”. It was the song he’d sung quietly into her ear one night when he thought she was asleep. She surprised him a few days later when she lifted the piano lid and played it in the living room after dinner. He continued to look at the paper while she played, but she could feel his grin beaming through the back of his head.
So it became a game they played at night where she said she was going to sleep and rolled over on her side and waited for the feel of his quivering breath at her ear and then his hopelessly flat whispered rendition of the song and a wee peck on the cheek night night before he turned and fell asleep himself. She wanted to turn and look him in the eye but knew he was shy and it would have ended the whole thing.
One day he came home with a bird all strange and colour-bright and squawking in foreign tongues. He said it was a talking bird and it repeated ‘hello ’ and ‘I beg your pudding !? ’ after him. He then asked her to play that song. "You know, our wee song ".
She knew what he meant, but fluffed the first few notes with nerves not having an earthly idea what was about to happen next.  What happened was that the bird started singing the opening lines again and again, so she played the opening lines again and again and he almost dared to join in with the fun. She eventually stopped and turned in the piano stool and looked at his great grin setting his features free, making her heart flutter.
But he took his sunshine away. He fell from a high ladder at work and was dead within the hour. She wouldn’t believe it even when she saw his broken corpse. Yet she found herself going through all rites of burying someone and eventually back in the house by herself. And the bird.

After some weeks of busy silence in the house, the bird suddenly said," I beg your pudding !? “” and she turned, her heart effervescing at being proved right: that he wasn’t dead at all because there he was with his daft phrase back from work at last.

So she talked to the bird and said all the things she wanted to say to him but knew it would just make him uncomfortable. She got the bird to say the phrases he taught it, and saw his grin, the wave ripples of his forehead as he read his paper. She opened the piano again and sure enough the bird sang the song and she played the song till soon it was just her playing and trying to stay in tune through her sobs.
Each morning she took off the cover of the birdcage and said “Good morning sunshine, " and he would say it back to her through the bird. He said things to her that were in his heart but that he could only say as a bird. She teased him about some of the things he said, wondered what his friends would say if they heard the romantic and naughty things he came out with. How lovely it is to speak what is in your heart to the person that is in your heart.
The bird died just as suddenly as he had. She took off the cover one morning and it was stiff at the bottom of the cage. Life was just a lie. What it made you want it took from you.
She put the cover back over the cage and left it there. She left it there because she hadn’t taken it off in the first place to look. And if she didn’t look, she needn’t see and he would always be there waiting with his song for as long as she didn’t lift the cover. So there it would remain.